Table of Contents

National Hospital Discharge Survey Series

Investigator(s): National Center for Health Statistics

In 1964, the National Center for Health Statistics initiated
a continuous sample of hospital discharge records, collecting medical and
demographic information for calculating statistics on hospital utilization, and
on the nature and treatment of illness among the hospitalized population. In the
surveys, which are made available in annual public use files, data are abstracted
from medical records for a sample of patients discharged from a sample of
nonfederal short-stay hospitals across the nation.